ELISE ASHER, born in Chicago, has been living in Greenwich Village and Provincetown, Massachusetts since 1948.  In 1994 she published with Sheep Meadow Press The Visionary Gleam, in which she juxtaposes forty-seven plates of her own paintings with their sources in poems from the great tradition.


"The poet Elise Asher's life in art is extraordinary. Night Train contains all the poetry that she wants to preserve, the truth of her life found in language, a life lived in two arts: her poetry kept until now almost in hiding, her other art—public.  (The painting is seldom separated from images drawn from poetry). The poetry leads us through a private world, sometimes our own, to beauty discovered, to basic truth, to places arrived at, it seems at all hours, in the middle of the night. We do not know how we got there because the night has been long and Elise Asher was awake when we were sleeping. In the bottom of the night we are startled by her artistry."—Stanley Moss